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Hidden Rainbows

When driving home from work one evening, I saw a beautiful rainbow stretch across the sky. As I approached the stop light which granted me an extra few moments to appreciate this beautiful manifestation of nature, I put on my green-shaded (they are prettier than they sound) sunglasses to protect my sensitive eyes from the brightly shining sun. As I did, the rainbow disappeared. I pulled them away and put them back on. With the shades on, I had to strain to see the rainbow. With them off, the rainbow was vividly apparent.

We see the world through lenses — both those that we place on our face and those that we superimpose on the way we metaphorically see the world. Perhaps the most cliched example of this is seeing the world through rose colored glasses. But there are other lenses that influence our perception of reality, like those we put on to protect ourselves after having difficult or scary experiences. Sometimes we are not aware that we have used lenses to cloud our vision, and other times we become so used to them that we become accustomed to accepting the world in a certain way.

Throughout the course of any given day, we may exchange our lenses as a response to our environment, to prepare for a certain interaction, or to make sense of an unusual experience. We can experiment with our lenses, intentionally switching them out to see the world and our experiences in new, exciting, and transformative ways. We can even develop a lens repertoire so that we can call upon those lenses which will best help us to learn and grow at any given moment.

The lenses that shade our vision of the world may be obscuring beautiful rainbows, just as my green sunglasses did that evening when I was driving home from work. Try removing or switching your lenses to see what mysteries and novelties are revealed.